I seem to be having some trouble with Panda3D. I have all the latest graphics cards, a new processor in a recently bought Windows XP, so I shouldn’t be running into graphics problems…
But, during the first thing you make in the tutorials (the grassy scene with a walking panda and spinning camera) and even during Panda Greeting Card my CPU was getting a maximum of 88% of it’s usage used up by Panda3D. The Panda3D greeting card went about 10-15 fps and the grassy scene was about 10-15 as well…
I know it’s not supposed to do this, and I would like to know how I can fix this problem. I had nothing else running on my machine (except internet explorer to read the tutorial) so I know it’s coming from Panda.
I don’t know my exact System specs, but I do know that I have the latest graphics cards, a high quality processor (Pentium 4 I think), and a overall high-quality Windows XP, so I don’t see why it would be doing this.
That’s exactly what Panda is supposed to do. It uses as much of your available CPU as you’ve got, to render as fast as it can. That typically means you will see a CPU utilization in the range of 80 - 100%, even if there is almost nothing onscreen. Any 3-D rendering engine will do the same thing. Not to worry; it doesn’t hurt your CPU to use its full capacity, but it does mean you shouldn’t try to run Panda in the background at the same time you’ve got something else running (like a game) that also wants to use all of your CPU.
I would expect a higher frame rate than 15 fps on recent hardware, but the Greeting Card application is not really optimized for the Panda3D 1.0 series (it will perform better when we release Panda3D 1.1). So maybe this is not unexpected. However, you should certainly see higher frame rates on the grassy Panda scene.
I thought Josh Yelon put a cap of 60 frames per second so that you wouldn’t see all of that cpu usage. When I run it, I only see about 10% usage when viewing a blank screen or the default panda model. It seems like something is a little off with McSqueaky’s setup. I wouldn’t know how to solve it. 1.1 might fix the problem.